Conversations After Reading Friel (Part Two)
- By Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze, with Jim Hicks
Editor's Note: After attending a launch event for Howard Friel's Chomsky and Dershowitz: On Endless War and the End of CIvil Liberties, we asked a couple of friends of MR to sit down for conversation about the book and the crucial issues it raises. What follows is the second of a five-part discussion.
II. The Metaphor of the Lion
Jim Hicks: Well, we’ve already come close to a second point I wanted to discuss, because I find it really striking and deeply frightening—the characterization that Dershowitz uses to describe what he paints as the enemy, the metaphor of the lion. I thought that one of the things that Howard Friel does wonderfully well is to emphasize its usage, and, in a sense, to mobilize it as the center or baseline for the arguments of this public defender Dershowitz.
Amanda Minervini: I was also deeply struck by the metaphor of the lion. The book indeed opens on a discussion of metaphors: in a vortex of citations, Friel quotes Dershowitz who in turn quotes “his friend” Amos Oz, who himself used literary categories to explain two possible finales for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Dershowitz reports, Oz suggested that one conclusion may end up being “Shakespearian,” and another Chekhovian. In a Shakespearian drama, all conflicts are resolved but everyone is dead. At the end in Chekhov, everyone is alive, yet perfectly disappointed.
It seems to me that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we have too many elements of a Shakespearian drama for us to remain hopeful for a Chekhovian ending—as Dershowitz proposes. I myself tend to think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as analogous to The Tempest: there is a struggle for liberty (Ariel, the Palestinians, and the many Israelis who want a peaceful resolution); of racism and subalterity (Caliban, and the regime to which Palestinians in the Gaza strip are subjected); and even an “island,” this place or non-place, living through a state of exception, separated from the rest of the world, and subjected to a non-democratic rule (the Gaza strip).
Later Friel introduces Dershowitz’s theory of Muslim terrorism, a characterization based on the objectionable metaphor of the “wild lion.” “Muslim terrorists are wild lions…You do not try to deter a lion. You stop the lion by either building a cage between you and the lion or by disabling the lion or killing the lion” (73, 79-80).
I could not stop from relating this metaphor to how Ariel Sharon has been referred to in the press, especially in the United States: “Ari-el,” which in Hebrew means the “lion of god” – no less!
So terrorists are “wild lions” but Sharon’s is “god’s lion,” hence justified by god. But if lions are seen as wild beasts to be neutralized, then Sharon was also someone else’s lion. Calling him the “lion of god” uses religion, once more, to justify and call for massacres.
If one must talk about lions, then one must ask instead: “what created the lion? And how could we ever make peace with it?” As a scholar of St. Francis, I interpret the Franciscan legend of the taming of the wolf in precisely these terms—as a social contract that allowed the town of Gubbio, under attack by the wolf (which I read as a metaphor for war and killing) to finally live in peace. Francis’s negotiations, which eventually lead to a peaceful resolution, start by asking “and what created this world?” Francis understood that if you feed it, the wolf won’t kill. So easy! What Chomsky says about the terrorist attacks against the US is also disarmingly simple: “If you want to stop Muslims killing you, stop killing them” (217). Yet instead of understanding, instead of peacefully taming the wolf, Dershowitz talks about “caging the wild lion.” Moreoever, when reading Friel, while exercising basic critical skills, it also becomes clear that, if we simply must talk about lions, we should keep in mind that, in the present moment, the US is the biggest lion of all.
Jim Hicks: Yes, Sharon’s nickname could even be used to counter Dershowitz’s argument, simply by repeating it. Obviously, two things are troubling about this sort of rhetoric: both the possibility that it will be effective, but, even more, where it leads. Quite simply, it leads nowhere good.
Adam Sitze: I’d also like to comment on Amanda’s observation, which I like very much. It seems to me rare in the history of political philosophy for somebody to say of the wolf, “the wolf can be tamed.” One thinks of course of Hobbes, who begins from the premise that man is a wolf to man, and who then produces a political apparatus—the sovereign—designed to tame the wolf. And yet in Hobbes, even as the wolf is domesticated into a political animal, the instrument that allows that domestication—the sovereign—remains a wolf, as Derrida teaches us in his lectures on the rogue, the sovereign, and the thief. The sovereign himself, in this case Ariel Sharon, remains in the state of nature, and remains precisely a wolf, or in what amounts to the same thing, a lion, a beast of prey who by nature is liable to attack at any given moment. The Hobbesian discourse on the wolf—on homo necans, the human as predator—doesn’t then tame the wolf. It negates the wolf, raising it to a higher level: it allows us wolfmen to become humans on condition that the sovereign remain a predator. It leads us to a situation where the sovereign and the beast double each other, where Sharon can perceive himself as a lion fighting other perceived lions, and where the predation of human on human is like a chronic disease, mitigated but not cured by the apparatus of modern politics. The same is even more true for a thinker like Locke: the beast of prey, the wolf, the lion, should be killed, you cannot reason with it, you can only exterminate it. This bears very much on the question of what it means to critique someone like Dershowitz. I’m skeptical that a critique like Chomsky’s, which seeks to universalize certain premises of Anglo-American liberal legality, will suffice for the purposes of questioning Dershowitz’s desire to “go rogue” against perceived predators: precisely this desire, it seems to me, is authorized or even required in advance by some of the founding texts of Anglo-American liberalism.
Perhaps St. Francis gives us a way of thinking about politics that is neither Hobbesian or Lockean. Maybe we can find in his work a paradigm for thinking about, not exactly what it would be to reason with the wolf, but a way to live with the wolf that doesn’t also turn you into a wolf, a way to live with the predator that doesn’t also oblige one to become a predator. Maybe his position on the wolf gives us a kind of counter-modernity, a modernity prior to and different from the modernity that today is in shambles in so many different ways.
Amanda Minervini: Well, that’s my reading of the legend of the taming of the wolf. I don’t know if most other scholars would agree, because I’m reading him here in a very nontraditional fashion. If we must remain in the realm of metaphors, however, I think this would be a more interesting approach. But, on the other hand, as a literary scholar, I also feel the need to clear out all these metaphors. If you look at history, when language starts to slide and people are metaphorized into animals, it’s usually a problem.
Jim Hicks: Yes, just a small problem. Amanda rightfully cites Chomsky’s argument. “If you want to stop Muslims killing you, stop killing them.” Again, this is a wonderful place to begin. Such a short, clear sentence. But it seems that Chomsky doesn’t want to begin there, he simply thinks that saying this ends the argument. So, Adam, you’re suggesting that Chomsky’s response continues the logic of the beast, of the lion or the wolf, and fails to go back to what Amanda points to in St. Francis—that if you feed wolves, they become puppies.
Adam Sitze: Awwww… you had to bring puppies into it.
Jim Hicks: Everybody loves a puppy, right?
Adam Sitze: I guess this is the way I’d pose the question. What, in the end, is the desire of the left? What do we want, beyond a superego-driven politics, beyond a politics of shame and negation? What is our desire? That’s the question I don’t see answered in Chomsky. I think that the position that Dershowitz takes—that you don’t try to deter a lion, no, you stop the lion by building a cage between you and the lion, or by disabling it, or by killing it—I think that is true to Anglo-American liberalism in the worst way, in the worst possible way. And I think that what we should want today is to begin to produce a critical discourse that allows us to desire something other than those paradigms. I wouldn’t then say that Chomsky lends himself directly to reversal on that point, but I do find him wanting, precisely because his desire seems to be that liberal legality—not only the institutions and practices of international law, but also the rule of law—needs to change only by becoming more fully what it already claims to be, by becoming more consistent, less contradictory, more exactly applied, less riddled with exceptions, and so on. He doesn’t seem to want to question this concept of law, ask about its depolicitizing effects, or think beyond it. Amanda’s reading of St. Francis, by contrast, does that: it’s an experiment with a way out of the deadlock of liberal legality that I find underlying the Chomsky-Dershowitz polemic. But my short response is no, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying “don’t kill them and they won’t kill you.” That sounds like Hobbes to me.
Link to Part Three
Amanda Minervini is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian and German at Salem State University. She has published translations of Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Carlo Galli, as well as essays on Saint Francis, Italian cinema, and the work of the philosopher Roberto Esposito. Her essay on the war years of Saint Francis and Pope Francis will appear in MR this fall.
Adam Sitze is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2013). He has also edited, with Timothy Campbell, Biopolitics: A Reader (Duke UP, 2013) as well as Carlo Galli's Political Spaces and Global War (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010).
